Poppy

Nicholas J. Saunders is the world’s leading authority on the anthropological archaeology of the First world war. A lecturer in the department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, he undertook the first-ever study of Great war material culture as a British Academy Senior Research Fellow at University College London between 1998 and 2004. His exhibition of trench art from the war was for five years a centrepiece of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium. He has published more than twenty-five books, including Trench Art, Killing Time, Alexander’s Tomb and Matters of Conflict, and has appeared in documentaries for the BBC, the National Geographic Channel and the History Channel. He co-directs two major Great war archaeological projects, in Jordan and Slovenia, and lives in west Sussex.

'Saunders movingly presents the poppy in its beauty, its tragedy and its healing power as a potent symbol every year in our national and global remembrance of loss.'